#146 - Anna West

Anna West - Sleep and Recovery Specialist Sleep2perform and Brentford FC

This episode was brought to you by Hauora - a performance wellbeing growth partner. Hauora aims to educate and impact individual behavioural change and organisational culture to ignite health, wellbeing, and performance. Find out more at www.HauoraLife.com

Anna is a Danish healthcare professional who specialises in sleep, recovery, and wellbeing. Her company, Sleep2perform is a scientifically-grounded consultancy that aims to create projects to positively change behavior and unlock peak performance. Anna works with leading sports teams and businesses across Europe helping individuals and groups to peak by understanding their sleep patterns, their correlation to circadian rhythm, stress levels, lifestyle choices and ultimately help them become better sleepers.

Her learning framework moves beyond a quick fix...providing practical tools and strategies to create sustainable high performance. She believes that you need an academic approach to measure, analyse and make healthy recommendations - but you need a pragmatic and innovative approach to transform knowledge into habits that generate long-lasting results!

Today we speak about the differences between Switzerland, where she is based now, and Denmark. We explore why sleep was her path to specialise in, how the morning sets us up for optimum sleep - and routines. Anna unpacks wind downs after late games, discusses monitoring sleep with tech - and the challenges and opportunities with that. We ask about anxiety with sleep latency, and what to do if you can't settle in bed. This chat is for parents of young children, elite athletes trying to understand more about sleep and gain a competitive edge...and everyone in between!

Transcript

  • 2.11 - Being formal + informal elite sport

  • 4. 00 - Independent consultancy

  • 4. 54 - Framework to increase sleep quality

  • 5. 30 - Optimising framework

  • 6. 03 - Working with habits in day to increase sleep

  • 7. 12- Psychological profile

  • *9.11 - Technology is a support not a solution

  • 9. 48 - Sleep + athletes precondition to recovery

  • 11. 18 - Study on athlete compliance;

  • 12. 34 - Bad orientated philosophy shift

  • *13. 08 - Comparison to nutritional intervention

  • *14. 48 - Preach to have consistent good days

  • *15. 28 - Shift worker + inconsistent sleep + advice

  • 18. 57 - Link to cavemen

    19. 34 - Showers on waking and sleep

  • 21. 11 - 5 hours or less sleep = small balls!!

  • 25. 00 - Struggling with sheep latency + breathing ex's

  • 27. 25 - Shild + stress related sleep - light + journaling

  • 28. 08 - Journaling habit

  • 31. 19 - Kit man onboarding

  • 32.00 - High Performance